Content Warning: This guide section features depictions of domestic violence, racism, and murder.

“None of the boarders ever lingered to talk. Hellos in the corridor, a good-morning over the breakfast eggs, but otherwise it was all just ships passing in the night. Briarwood House didn’t seem to be the kind of place where people got chatty.”

Pete makes this observation about the boarders in the book’s first pages. The comment establishes that Grace has arrived in a cold environment. The author uses the idiomatic language of “ships passing in the night” to describe the transitory, non-significant nature of the Briarwood House’s residents’ relationships with each other. However, the quote also establishes the baseline for all the changes that are about to occur. Once the text introduces the Briar Club, everyone is going to get very chatty indeed.

“His mother was sometimes utterly, meanly, completely wrong, and he didn’t have to agree with her when she was. He didn’t have to fight her about it, either. He could just…get around her.”

Pete makes this comment about his mother at the end of the first chapter. When the novel opens, he blindly obeys her every command. It is his exposure to Grace and her less rigid philosophy of life that opens his eyes. The house’s many rules don’t faze the new tenant. She circumvents them every time Doilies goes to another bridge game. Pete observes this and begins modeling his behavior on Grace’s. The model Grace offers represents the start of his Struggle for Freedom.

“Whenever it felt the friendly tickle of that paintbrush in Grace’s hand. That was the moment at which, you might say, the house began to wake up. Just like people, houses go to sleep if bored, and things had been boring at Briarwood House for so long.”

This comment comes from Briarwood House itself. Grace’s urge to “feed and fix” extends to inanimate objects as well. The bilious green walls of the hallway are her first target to fix.